Month: June 2012

NCTS discoveries

Dave Mueller

I’ve been really bad about updating my site – sorry about that! Things have been busy for me at work and home.

A couple months ago, my son and I went exploring on NCTS in an attempt to connect the northern and southern ends of the hidden road I’ve documented previously. The section on NCTS was the only piece of road I’ve not walked. We parked the car and started out along what appeared to be the road, but we were only finding more recent trash, probably from the 1970’s and early 80’s.

We kept going, looking around, until I came across a piece of broken Japanese beer bottle. Bingo! It turned out that we were following a newer road, and this was the point where the older WW2 era road crossed. We finally re-found the old road – and immediately started coming across WW2 era finds.

1945 Coke bottle (Oakland CA) next to what looked like a caulking gun – but turned out to be a WW2 era vehicle fire extinguisher
Big pile of 1944 and 1945 coke bottles
This appears to be a long forgotten spool of communications wire

As we continued north, we ran into what clearly was a former Japanese site, later occupied by the Americans. There were literally hundreds of Japanese beer bottles scattered about, among other items.

Large pile of Japanese beer bottles – mostly Dai Nippon
An old washing machine, with a Japanese beer bottle sitting alongside
Japanese Dai Nippon and Kirin beer bottles scattered almost everywhere you look

Near this site, my son and I found an area with depressions in the floor of the limestone forest. I thought these were small sink holes or perhaps foxholes. My son picked up something and started hitting the trees with it – I took a look at what he had found and was amazed to see it was a piece of shrapnel. It turns out these holes were actually shell craters! We looked and found quite a bit more shrapnel laying around. Had the Japanese been here during the barrage, they would have had a real rough time.

Justin standing in a shell crater – difficult to capture in a photo. It’s about 3ft deep and 8ft across
Pieces of shrapnel. Some were large enough to deduce they were 75mm HE rounds, likely fired from pack howitzers.
We also found some live ammunition – M1 Garand in this case. Treated with respect (do not touch!)
Japanese gas mask cartridge found in an old bulldozed pile of rubble. At first I was not sure of the origin – Japanese or American
The gas mask cartridge was found heavily damaged from 70 years in the jungle. You can see the interior and what likely was activated carbon that made up part of the filter element.
This manufactures mark proves without a doubt that this is of Japanese origin

It turned out that the very last section of road to be explored had the neatest finds! To me, this seemed to be a special place with some historical significance. Other than saying it is on NCTS property, I feel it’s best not to identify the location as I’ve done with previous sites. As another note – I left everything as found, including the gas mask cartridge which I returned to it’s original location after I took the photos. Removing artifacts from Federal Property is prohibited. Take photos only and leave it for the next person to discover! There are plenty of placed on Guam where you can find WW2 era bottles and other items – such as in the vicinity of Two Lovers Point. These areas have been heavily disturbed since the war and bottles can still be found literally just off the side of the road, mixed with modern day roadside trash that unfortunately is very prevalent due to illegal dumping.